Changes in privacy and general tech over the last several years have all but completely hampered audience (user) segmentation on the client-side. Meaning, we can’t reliably segment website visitors, such that testing landing pages and conversion funnels no longer lets us ensure that whatever test variation you see first is the only one that you see. You’re in “bucket A” or “bucket B”, but not both. That’s out the window, for the most part, shy of some pretty expensive tools but even then, it’s not really clean.

Same goes for creative testing, where the end user is so often behind a veil that you can’t reliably show any particular user only one of your ad creative variations. We’re back to 2005 on this point, where creative testing is still beneficial but a bit of a free-for-all. If you have a favorite plugin, give us a shout (marketing@whitelabeldigital.co), there’s always something new out there and we’d love to hear about it.

Don’t let the lack of a handle convince you not to test ad creative or conversion funnels. It’s still important. I like to ask clients, “if you ran a retail store and I could tell you that as people walk-in they’ll see different layouts of your store/products, we’ll monitor which layouts they see over time, and track each layout’s impact on sales. At the end of the test we’ll tell you which layout drives the highest sales per visitor – would you want me to do that?”. The answer is obviously yes, but why people don’t do this with their websites is a mystery. Seems like a giant oversight, to me.

Don’t forget that it doesn’t really matter why a color, CTA, headline, or other variation works better than another, it only matters that you know what works best so that you can act on it. Test, implement the winner, repeat, but in small increments and for large volume sites you might consider using a small portion of your site’s traffic as a test pool. You’ll also likely find different “champion” iterations from one channel or traffic source to the next. That’s OK, given the varying level of motivation and familiarity that users have across all of your marketing channels.

We’re always looking for problems to solve, and we’re happy to show you how we do it. Drop us a line here or email us directly at info@whitelabeldigital.co for more info.